In current electronic telecommunications the transmission of messages on the basis of an internet protocol has gained particularly high importance due to the fact that the messages may be transmitted in a particularly convenient manner in computer networks. Various messaging services are employed that use a variety of protocols. Examples of message transmission services include e-mail, instant messaging, and uploading of a message to a domain.
The messaging service that allows the electronic sending of information is therefore regarded as the most important and frequently used service of the internet. In the case of e-mail, the carrier of the information is the so-called “body” of the e-mail, which in addition to the electronic text message may include any given data attachments such as images, music, or programs. Instant messages may also contain such data attachments.
Known from the mobile wireless field is the so-called Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS), which for various reasons has not developed into an application that is as widely used as e-mail service or instant messaging. One advantage of MMS over e-mail service is the greater variability of the destination address. A multimedia message may be sent as MMS to a call number or an e-mail address. However, this presumes that the sender has an MMS-capable terminal. In addition, the terminal of the recipient must either be MMS-capable, so that the recipient is able to directly retrieve and use an MMS sent to him, or must be set up to receive an electronic short message (Short Messaging Service (SMS)) so that the recipient is able to receive via SMS an internet address in the form of a Uniform Resource Locator (URL), at which he may access the MMS via the internet. Furthermore, without an MMS-capable terminal the recipient of an MMS is not able to reply to an MMS, not even via an e-mail, because the address to which a reply would be sent is a call number.
For the address handling, dynamic approaches such as Telephone Number Mapping (ENUM)-based services are known that allow use of the Domain Name system (DNS) for translating telephone numbers into internet addresses. Such services have arisen from the need to provide the users of internet-based voice services, also referred to as Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), with accessibility under the same number, using the internet as well as the classic telephone. For ENUM services, however, the terminal of the user must be equipped with appropriate software, and all communication partners must be registered for the service with their respective addresses. Only communication partners who have stored an e-mail address as a contact address are able to receive e-mails. These services are thus limited to small groups, and are therefore unsatisfactory.
It is known from German Unexamined Patent Application DE 199 36 855 to provide a public line-based telephone network that basically offers all subscribers the option of text communication without the need for specialized equipment, where the text communication may be in e-mail format using a text message. It is proposed that each telephone subscriber is assigned his own internal network e-mail address, which is provided in the format “subscriber call number in E.164 format@operator.country.” The e-mail may be delivered using only the subscriber call number, a mail server of the sender performs the task of delivering the e-mail after a text-to-voice conversion, and the delivery is carried out by outputting the converted-to-voice e-mail via the receiver of a given telephone.
It is very disadvantageous that the text of the e-mail must be converted to a voice message for delivery. Such a conversion fundamentally requires a clean text message and is also resource-intensive, and in particular for e-mails with graphical content and e-mails with file attachments is basically not possible. Because of the operating principle, the conversion to a voice message is carried out even when the terminal of the recipient is capable of receiving not only voice messages, but also data messages. A further disadvantage is that this is an internal network approach, and in addition to the call number of his communication partner the sender must generally also know the network provider (operator) for the communication partner as well as the corresponding country in order to be able to send an e-mail to the communication partner.
For instant messaging or uploading of messages to a domain, heretofore no message-sending process has been known that is based on a call number of the recipient.